Japan's next prime minister

Glad to be grey

In a remarkable turn, the job is Yasuo Fukuda's to lose

SOON after he announced on September 12th his intention to resign as prime minister, Shinzo Abe withdrew to the barren consolations of a hospital room and drip, physically and perhaps emotionally broken. No formal handover of power to his chief cabinet secretary, Kaoru Yosano, took place, yet since his resignation nearly nothing has been heard of Mr Abe. It is said that Mr Yosano carries the odd bundle of papers to him. In effect, the world's second-largest economy is leaderless.

Mr Abe's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has rushed to find a successor. Elections for the party presidency will be held on September 23rd. Two days later the winner will become prime minister, because appointing one is the job of the lower house of the Diet (parliament), and there the ruling coalition has a huge majority. By contrast, in late July the LDP lost control of the upper house to the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), a humiliating defeat that was at the root of Mr Abe's undoing.

It had for months been assumed that the front-runner to succeed Mr Abe, whenever he went, was Taro Aso, grandson of Japan's most notable post-war prime minister, Shigeru Yoshida. Mr Aso was foreign minister under Mr Abe until he was appointed the party's secretary-general in late August in a revamped government and party line-up. Mr Aso, a former Olympic shot and a fan of manga comics, has an urbane assurance that once had widespread appeal. Yet so deep runs the anger within the LDP at the nature and timing of Mr Abe's resignation—unnecessary weeks after the election defeat, yet a mere two days after the prime minister had opened a new session of the Diet with Japan's version of a state-of-the-union address—that Mr Aso's ambitions now look shattered.

Not only is he tainted by association with Mr Abe. Mr Aso also knew of the prime minister's intentions a couple of days before the country and the rest of the party's grandees. It was a blunder for a usually adroit politician not to warn his colleagues of their approaching crisis. With extraordinary speed, disgusted members called upon Yasuo Fukuda, a 71-year-old stalwart, son of another former prime minister, to step in, something he had not done last time round. He has already won the backing of all the main factions and looks poised to become prime minister. Mr Aso's surviving hopes lie with the LDP's prefectural chapters, which cast votes along with Diet members.

ReutersFukuda forces Aso into the background

It would be a novelty if the two candidates had big policy differences. But as far as it is possible to tell, their views are remarkably similar. Neither wants the LDP to revert to the system of regional patronage and public works that Mr Abe's predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, did much to destroy. But both want to help the presumed victims of market reforms and budget tightening, most of them outside the main cities of Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya.

If anything, what differences did exist have narrowed. Mr Fukuda, like his father, has argued for full reconciliation with the Asian victims of Japanese imperial aggression, and his ties with China are close. Mr Aso, meanwhile, is a scion of a family cement company that used Chinese and Korean slave labour, and he has a revisionist view of Japan's past. As foreign minister, he proposed an “arc of freedom and prosperity” that conspicuously excluded China. Yet now he claims to be the first foreign minister to welcome China's rise. Only over nuclear North Korea do real differences remain. Mr Aso is adamant that pressure must be used until North Korea dismantles its weapons and explains the mysterious disappearances of ordinary Japanese during the 1970s and 1980s. Mr Fukuda, by contrast, stresses the eventual normalisation of ties.

Above all, Mr Fukuda appeals to his party on style. Greyness is back, synonymous with competence. Conciliation and compromise are to get a chance, while flamboyance is out. Even that consummate showman, Mr Koizumi, with no love for Mr Fukuda, has given his backing.

And perhaps the LDP, for once, is smart. For the autocratic opposition leader, Ichiro Ozawa, himself a former LDP strongman, was counting on confrontation to bring down the government. His chosen issue is the extension of emergency “anti-terror” measures sanctioning the refuelling of ships in the Indian Ocean as part of the campaign in Afghanistan. Mr Ozawa has said that the upper house will vote down any extension of operations not countenanced by the United Nations.

Already, Mr Fukuda is unsettling the DPJ. He says he wants to discuss a framework allowing Japan to play a more predictable role in the world's troublespots. The government succeeded in pushing the UN Security Council into thanking Japan and other countries helping fight terrorists in Afghanistan. For Mr Ozawa, this was unwelcome. Many in his party regret the knock to Japan's international standing from the leadership crisis, and do not want to make matters worse by ordering Japan's navy back from the Indian Ocean. One such critic, Seiji Maehara, Mr Ozawa's predecessor as leader of the DPJ, says his successor should follow the party consensus, not pre-empt the debate. As for Mr Fukuda, wanting to survive as prime minister until a budget is passed next spring, and perhaps until Japan's hosting of the G8 summit next summer, he may hope that one compromise wrested from the DPJ will lead to another.